Reply #41: That's ridiculous

[PurityOfEssence]

Dean was the most conservative of the candidates with the possible exception of Lieberman. Take away Lieberman's "Israel above all" warmongering and his tight-assed pornography and morality-in-media stances, and his record at the time wasn't all that bad.

Having said that, Dean was still squarely centrist, but in a good way. He's not an extreme corporatist in the Clintonian sense, but he's hardly a leftist.

I've truly come around on the man and think he's done a bang-up job as Chairman, but there's much about his '04 campaign that leaves a nasty taste in the mouth. He claimed credit for the health care in Vermont, even though it was well in the pipeline before his ascendancy. He flatly claimed to have always been against the IWR, when statements in the time leading up to it show this to simply not be true. He claimed that all the Senators voted for the Bush tax cuts, when they all had voted against them; this is especially scurrilous, but not as bad as Clark repeating it later on. Breaks given to business for the sake of economic development are also an issue.

His stance on the IWR vote is hardly cut-and-dried, and neither is Clark's nor Obama's. The only way one can tell how one would vote on a bill is if they actually have to stand up and be counted. Praise goes to Kucinich here, just as Edwards, Clinton, Kerry, Dodd and Biden have some 'splainin to do.

All in all, though, the characterization of him being to the left of Edwards on social or economic policy in the 2004 primary season is simply incorrect.

The forces of revisionism have declaimed mightily from on high that Edwards was some kind of blue dog Democrat and only recently became a populist. It simply isn't true. Edwards was the candidate in the '04 election decrying predatory lending and the shifting of the tax code from wealth to wages; if one listens to his early stump speeches in '03, it was all about worker issues like these.

You have been admirably modulated of late, even defending Edwards in a situation where someone was agreeing with you but damning Edwards to a degree you considered unwarranted, and I know that you don't like the man that much, so pointing out the grey area that so many deny is much to your credit as a person. I'm afraid history just isn't with you on this one, much as so many suffer from the same mischaracterization. It's the biggest jaw-dropper of the media coverage of the '03-'04 fight: that Dean was the liberal of the bunch. It's also the reason why many of us were so turned off to him initially; when he claimed to represent the "Democratic Wing of the Democratic Party", he was pissing all over a bunch of very decent people--virtually all of whom were more liberal--and doing so from the safe haven of not having had to be held to account for things like the Patriot Act or the IWR.

This isn't to say he was a closet reactionary or anything, but the very idea that he was more liberal than Edwards in '03-'04 is completely untrue. As you can see, it's a very big sticking point for me: it has been "accepted" as "fact" that Edwards is some expedient poseur who has only recently found the decent causes of the people, when he's been a champion for the poor, the workers, minorities, women, fair trade, unions, health care and other unpopular populist causes from the beginning. It's sad that so many people have just let this false depiction go unchallenged, and fairness cries for a bit of history here. Part of the reason it was so hard for Edwards to get traction is that corporatists have had it in for him from the beginning; people on this board are unwitting dupes in this, and it could stand some illumination.